Ben Affleck: Filmmaker of the Year 2012

After he directed a couple of good movies, you probably thought: Eh, Boston crime flicks? Big deal—he barely left his backyard. But now, thanks to his globe-trotting, Oscar-caliber Argo—a gripping period thriller slash pitch-perfect showbiz satire— there's no denying it: Ben Affleck is a world-class filmmaker. He explains to Chris Heath how he hit rock bottom and reinvented himself as Hollywood's newest heavyweight

"I’m a little bit scattered and frazzled," Ben Affleck declares. His third movie as a director, Argo, is a few weeks from opening, and he has been doing all he can to help it on its way. These days, he explains, he’s reluctant to push himself too far to promote movies where he is just an actor—some reasons for this may become clear later on—but when he is the director, everything’s different. "I direct a movie," he says, "and I’ll stand out there in a chicken outfit with one of those twirling signs: FIVE DOLLARS OFF CHICKEN IF YOU SEE ARGO."

Perhaps it’s in that spirit—sign-twirling salesman in a chicken suit—that Affleck initially engages with today’s conversation. Never mind that Argo, based on the unbelievable-but-true tale of how the CIA set up a fake Hollywood science-fiction B movie in an attempt to smuggle six Americans out of Iran during the embassy crisis of 1979, is plenty good enough to prosper on its own merits. Its director—and its star—is also prepared to do whatever he must, which these days tends to require his acquiescence in the telling of a simple, three-part story about Ben Affleck’s life so far: the rise, the fall, and then the unexpected reemergence as Hollywood’s latest actor turned director with the golden touch.

All three parts of that story are, broadly speaking, true, but the full tale is a lot stranger and crazier and, at times, much more brutal. And as we begin to linger on some of the more extraordinary details, Affleck becomes increasingly animated. It feels as though it’s been a while since he has really talked this through, and that he might still have as much to work out about what happened to him as anyone else.

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Ben Affleck was a child actor, if not exactly a child star. His big success was a long-running educational science TV series called The Voyage of the Mimi, in which he was inquisitive and smart and keen and a little dorky. Acting was all he ever wanted to do, a delicate ambition to hold in a family with a father who had once wished for the same. "I lived with this tremendous fear of failure," Affleck says, "because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he...he failed, basically. Not just being an alcoholic and stuff. He didn’t do what he said he was going to do. He worked with guys who later became famous, like James Woods and Dustin Hoffman, and he wasn’t successful. And that wasn’t going to be me."

Affleck explicitly connects some of the missteps he would make later in his career to this fear of failure. "That definitely drove me," he says. "It drove me and drove me and drove me." But if it hurt, it also helped. "I have it to blame for some choices of working for money," he reflects, "and I have it to thank for not giving up."

Affleck became friends with Matt Damon when he was 8. Damon was 10. At that age, a two-year gap is huge and an unlikely one to have bridged. Damon’s bicycle was too big for Affleck to ride, he remembers, and Damon could simply blow him away on the basketball court. But there was something that balanced everything out. "I was littler and I was younger, but I had done acting," he says, "and that’s something that Mattwanted to do. That’s the thing I had." He was happy to share it. Affleck introduced Damon to his New York agent, who was pleased to sign up Damon, too: "He had the perfect look—blond-sweet-all-American-boy kind of face." After that, the two of them would travel down from Boston together to fail at the same auditions—for The Mickey Mouse Club, Batman & Robin—and would share lots of intense-young-actor talk, planning out careers they hadn’t yet earned any reason to expect. "I remember," says Affleck, laughing at their presumption, "we both decided that the ideal career to have was Robert Duvall’s."

After the usual years of struggle came the miracle of Good Will Hunting. "It was a product of a time in one’s life that is actually kind of magical—when you’ve become capable and have yet to realize that you’re fallible and that you’re going to die," Affleck reflects. In the movie, Damon was the lead—the instinctive math genius who may or may not learn to cherish and use his talent—and Affleck was the kindhearted storytelling manual-laborer friend who, for his comrade to soar free, would have to be left behind. Much of what the two of them put into the screenplay was drawn from their own lives, but it took Affleck a while to realize that some people also assumed that this overall dynamic was true. "Like ’Here’s the lovable dim friend who’s along for the ride’ or something," he says. "And Matt was a math genius! I didn’t even realize it for a long time, because it was such a positive experience. It was only two years later I had a conversation with a girl in the business, she said something along the lines of, ’I thought you were the dim-witted friend—you’re pretty bright.’ I was shocked. I had this moment of profound reflection: Does everybody think this about me?"

If they did, it was no impediment to his acting career. When Affleck was starting out, he had been told that he was simply not leading-man material. Too tall, for one thing. "One guy told me I was a great actor, I just would never be on the cover of a magazine." It got to him, and he was determined to prove people wrong, sometimes in ways that in retrospect may have been foolish. He had been cast in Michael Bay’sArmageddon even before Good Will Hunting’s release, in the process agreeing to some stipulated self-improvement. A couple of his teeth had been chipped, and one slightly smashed, in an accident with a pool triangle, but the required enhancements went beyond that—his teeth were to be capped so that the spaces between them would be filled, his smile smoothed out into one befitting a movie star. It was all part of theArmageddon production budget: "At the time it just seemed like, ’Well, this is the fake-teeth-getting part of my career.’ " Affleck seems unsure to this day whether this choice counts as an iniquitous compromise or as common sense and a free upgrade. "I guess I’m torn between my vanity and my principles still."

More big roles followed. Exactly how and when the tide turned against Affleck is complicated, but certainly one of the first markers was his second Michael Bay movie, Pearl Harbor. "The problem was," he says, "that Michael just wanted to make Armageddon putting it in an aircraft carrier in World War II. You can put it almost anywhere, but you can’t put it in the Second World War." Still, Pearl Harbor is one of those movies that, while remembered as something of a fiasco, was actually a significant international hit. And so Affleck, who deferred his usual fee but got a share of the profits, presumably made a fortune.

"Yeah, it worked out pretty well," he says evenly. "Yeah. Although I feel like I earned every penny. I remember someone doing a joke that said, ’That movie Pearl Harbor is the worst thing that happened to America since Pearl Harbor.’ "

What are the chances of you ever making a third movie with Michael Bay?

"Uh, I don’t have any interest in engaging in that sort of speculation."

The truly grim years were 2003 and 2004. One factor surely was that all five movies he released in that period (Daredevil, Gigli, Paycheck, Jersey Girl, and Surviving Christmas) were disasters of one kind or another. But it was also because the public simultaneously seemed to lap up and obsess over—and yet be disdainful of—every unremarkable aspect of his relationship with Jennifer Lopez. I had remembered a vague sense that he went through a particularly rough period, but reading back through the coverage of him in daily newspapers, it’s shocking how casually poisonous it was. Here are some representative comments from respectable newspapers in that period:

There is something unbearably smug and self-satisfied about Ben Affleck.... In the history of Hollywood, has any person in his position made more wrong choices over an extended period of time?... Affleck’s got a big-man-on-campus, aren’t-I-fabulous vibe to him, a yappy confidence in interviews that suggests no one thinks Ben Affleck is quite as funny and charming as Ben Affleck does.... And they say we don’t torture people.... Neither Lopez nor Affleck has a scintilla of the talent, epochal hold on us or enduring iconic status of their illustrious predecessors.... It’s time to put Ben Affleck out of our misery.

I read two particularly blunt examples out loud to Affleck. One is: At the risk of generalizing, there may not be a person on the planet who is more socially acceptable to hate. The other: It is fashionable at the moment to loathe Ben Affleck. To be honest, the guy makes it easy.

"It’s as mean-spirited a thing as it is kind of permissible to say in an editorial capacity," Affleck says in response to the second. That one comes from The Boston Globe. "My hometown paper."

Looking back, whatever Affleck’s real or perceived shortcomings, the viciousness of what was said about him now looks like a kind of collective lunacy. "At the time, I knew on some level, ’This is insane,’ " he says. No one on the planet was more socially acceptable to hate? Really? "What was that guy’s name who killed his wife and dumped her off the side of a boat?" He supplies the answer himself. "Peterson. I remember thinking he actually gets slightly better treatment than I do in the press. At least they had to say ’alleged killer.’ Unfortunately there’s an aspect of that that’s like one of those fights you see on YouTube where one of them falls down and then a bunch of people who were standing around come over and kick the person. They don’t know them, they have no involvement in the fight, but they recognize a moment that they can get a free shot in, and for some people it’s just too much to resist. And that was definitely me at that point. I was the guy. I was the designated person to loathe."

He’s still trying to work out exactly what it was all about. "The amount of venom—I must have touched some specific little place in the consciousness," he says. "I don’t believe I didn’t deserve any negative judgment for anything, but it was just way out of whack." He couldn’t recognize in himself the person he was suddenly assumed to be. "People decided that I was the frat guy, even though I’ve never been inside a fraternity, or the guy who beat them up at school, even though that wasn’t me at all." There was also something about the way the public saw him and Lopez, as though they were each simultaneously unworthy of the other, both making some kind of laughably terrible mistake, some kind of humiliating blunder that involved race and gender and class and talent, so that both were acting in a way that was inauthentic, that was a shameful betrayal of who they really were. The notion that they might be two people who just happened to have fallen in love was given short shrift. (About Lopez they were, if anything, even harsher. Affleck mentions how glad he was when Lopez appeared recently on American Idol so that the public finally had a chance to see that she was a perfectly pleasant person.)

Part of the contempt centered around a perception that they were courting this kind of attention, deliberately living out a romance in public and for publicity. Affleck suggests that he and Lopez emerged as a famous celebrity couple at the exact moment that the market for celebrity-gossip magazines exploded; that they were caught in the crossfire, and also blamed for the public’s simultaneous desire for and revulsion over all this endless coverage. Though Affleck and Lopez did do an unbearably cloying joint TV interview on Dateline, and probably updated the world about their ongoing romance in more detail than they needed to, there’s little evidence that they went looking for what they received. "The most pernicious illusion, myth, was that this is something that this guy wants," says Affleck. " ’He’s wanting this much coverage.’ That’s the most unappealing thing that you can say about somebody. And I knew how disastrous it was. It was the last thing I wanted, and I could tell it was damaging me, and I tried to get away from it, but there was still this idea: This is what this guy wants, he’s a shallow guy, a camera whore or whatever. And there was no convincing people that that wasn’t the case." The more he speaks about all of this, the more it’s clear that, once reawakened, the torment—and his bewilderment over what overtook him—is still fresh.

He does concede some mistakes. "There were ways I did contribute to it, still kind of naively. Like these car dealerships would often say, ’Hey, do you want to drive around a car? Go take it as long as you like. You can drive this Rolls-Royce for nothing, for free.’ The Boston kid in me thought, ’This is great! What a deal! I can just drive this car around. Let my friends drive it.’ But then this image of a young guy in a Rolls-Royce was very off-putting to people. Probably be off-putting to me now if I saw it. And I didn’t quite have the wherewithal to be smart about that at the time."

By the end of it all, Affleck had a series of failed movies, a failed relationship, and some of the worst press anyone has ever earned for doing little more than acting and being famous and occasionally showing a little clumsiness at both. He was left feeling battered by it all, an experience that he says "was really bad for me in all kinds of different ways, particularly in terms of my emotional life, my sense of self."

Did you strategize how to deal with it, or did you just run away for a while?

"I think I just ran away. You can only handle so much. I moved for a while to this place in Georgia that I have, was able to get away, by and large, from stuff. Come up with a plan for how to do something with my life that doesn’t put me in the crosshairs of this sort of thing."

Affleck decided that he wanted to direct a movie. The last time he had directed anything was as a student in California: a precociously themed short about a film director who goes mad. "About how people who are creative are indulged," says Affleck. "And they can do anything outrageous just because they are successful." He didn’t write the script, but he did come up with the title: I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meathook, and Now I Have a Three Picture Deal at Disney.

Now he wanted to direct a real feature film. At the time he had little optimism about how, even if he managed to pull it off, a movie directed by Ben Affleck would be welcomed. "I just assumed it would be received poorly," he says, "because it seemed the way that people wanted to talk about me." But Gone Baby Gone, a modestly budgeted dark thriller adapted from a Dennis Lehane book and starring his brother, Casey, was received warmly. "Nobody went to the movie, but we got pretty decent reviews."

Back then, there was another measure of success or failure that stuck in his head. He had never thought of Gone Baby Gone as the first step in a bold new career, but somebody told him that about 80 percent of the members of the Directors Guild of America only ever make one movie, and when he heard that he was determined not to be one of them. "The first day of The Town was one of the most satisfying days of my career," he says. "For better or worse, I’m going to have made two movies." The Town was a tale of crime and love in Boston, and this time Affleck directed himself in the lead role. Affleck says that The Town tested poorly in previews, and so it came as a surprise when it was not only acclaimed but a substantial commercial hit. Now, with the early enthusiasm surrounding Argo, Affleck suddenly seems to be reinvented as someone who can do little wrong.

When asked what he may be good at as a director, Affleck talks about allowing actors a freedom to relax and time to succeed, and about having the patience to edit performances meticulously, and about looking out for the kind of special moments he cherished when he watched movies ("...that great moment where Brando turns around and looks at Martin Sheen...this incredible moment in Glory where Denzel is getting whipped and looks up...") and building a movie around them, and about a focus on a kind of simplicity ("My movies are unadorned, they’re not particularly fancy, I think they’re kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting"), and most of all about the pure amount of effort he puts in. "I appreciate the fact that I get to do it, and I work really, really hard. I went into it thinking, ’I’m new at this,’ but I also went into it with a healthy sense that I needed to succeed, and the one thing I could control was to work as hard or harder than anyone else."

Why did you need to succeed?

"It just felt like life or death to me."

Our conversation takes place on the top floor of the Beverly Hilton, chosen because it is where a key scene in Argo was filmed. During the shoot, this room was full of actors dressed as bad-science-fiction aliens for a press event intended to drum up authentic-seeming publicity for the fake film whose production is devised as cover to smuggle the six Americans out of Iran. Today there are just the two of us, seated at a very small table in a large empty room. Hotel staff periodically come by to inquire when everyone else will be arriving.

As we talk, Affleck eats a burger. On the way here, he was caught in Los Angeles traffic and suddenly realized that he was alongside the TMZ Hollywood Tour and that he had been spotted. He gamely waved to the passengers and clearly was as charming as the situation required. ("Very cool guy, drove right up next to the bus and said hi to everyone," someone aboard later tweeted.) But Affleck tells me that it soon got awkward, because the traffic forced the two vehicles to shuffle forward together, and the TMZ host began to bombard him with family questions. Eventually he turned off into a store’s parking lot, not because it was somewhere he wanted to go but because it was somewhere they wouldn’t.

Soon he’ll be returning to the family they were asking about: "There’s going to be three maniacs screaming and running around the house." Affleck explains how skillfully his older children—he has 6- and 3-year-old daughters as well as a baby son born earlier this year—are learning to stretch out the bedtime ritual by increments, day by day. "But it’s sweet," he says, "and washes away all the other stuff."

Affleck is married to Jennifer Garner. They got together at the end of that period when everything was at its lowest. "It was a really, really good thing that happened to me around the time that it was nice to have something good happen," he says. "And she’s just a great woman and a great friend." As well as, he says, a stellar mother: "She has such wise and certain stewardship over these three characters that I love so much."

Which presumably allows you to sweep in to be hero dad.

"Oh, believe me, I’m always trying to sweep in and be hero dad, give them things they’re not allowed to have, just completely pander to them. ’Have you had dessert yet?’ ’You guys want to watch TV?’ "

Affleck is not without ego, but he seems sincere about the fact that he considers his directing career only in its early days and that there is much more he can learn. To this end he is currently giving himself a methodical education, a process triggered by the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and his realization that he’d seen far too few. (His favorite discovery so far has been the work of John Cassavetes: "I totally ripped off The Killing of a Chinese Bookie for the L.A. sections of Argo.")

That’s also the reason why he took the latest of his now occasional acting roles for another director in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder. Affleck is well aware that the result may not be to everyone’s taste. "I understand it got booed quite thoroughly at [the Venice Film Festival]," he says. "Honestly, you have to want to see that movie—there’s hardly any talking. It’s a tone poem. If you don’t want to see that, you should not go." Affleck had a fair idea of what he was getting involved in because when he met Malick for lunches and dinners beforehand, Malick would tell him things like, "Just more and more I’m more interested in silences"—which is a slightly unusual thing to say to an actor you’re about to cast in a movie. Malick also told Affleck he wanted him to be like Gary Cooper, but when Affleck showed Malick some Gary Cooper tapes he’d put together, Malick was horrified. "Oh, no no no! He’s just rattling on!" Malick exclaimed. This wasn’t the Gary Cooper of Malick’s memory: "Gary Cooper, he just stares off."

They filmed for eight weeks in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. "The experience of it seemed half-crazy in that we didn’t really have dialogue, so I didn’t really know what was happening. Then I realized that he was accumulating colors that he would use to paint with later in the editing room. My character doesn’t really do that much. It was kind of a wash for me in terms of learning something as an actor, because Terry uses actors in a different way—he’ll [have the camera] on you and then tilt up and go up to a tree, so you think, ’Who’s more important in this—me or the tree?’ But you don’t ask him, because you don’t want to know the answer."

Anyway, Affleck didn’t take the job for that—he took the job because he wanted to learn from Malick as a director, and this he did: ways of using natural light, being nimble enough to just jump out of a van and start filming. More skills stored up for all the movies he hopes to make.

One film he is developing—"It’s not ready; it’s not good enough yet"—is about the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger and will star Matt Damon. (Affleck and Damon regularly confer about work. Damon and his wife and four kids live very close to Affleck in the same Los Angeles neighborhood and get together for barbecues and such.) Affleck is also working on an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, struggling to condense its epic nature into a manageable form. "Right now we’re having a very hard time," he says. "But I like the idea—it’s like The Lord of the Rings in America. And it’s about how we would reinvent ourselves as a society. If we started all over again, what would we do?"

You can hear his calm and satisfaction when he talks about things like this, as though he has finally found himself a life with the kinds of problems he wants to have. In his head he has a notion that he should direct four movies in the next ten years. With maybe the occasional acting job in between.

"I’m in a place where I feel a bit more like I felt after Good Will Hunting, but with a sort of added perspective," he says. "I feel like I’ve gone round a loop once. And for this lap, it’s more measured. I’m not the most loathsome man in the world. I’ve dropped to number nine."

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